With convergence in communications media, a variety of different modes of communication, including voice, video, instant messaging, and conferencing, can be unified around a single user identity. A communications application running on a computer can employ the same identity used by the user for logging on to the computer. The user identity is typically a login username and password combination, each of which can include strings of alphanumeric characters that are typically entered into a computer keyboard.
Devices such as IP (Internet protocol) telephones can also be connected to the same network as the computer, and therefore, typically use the same username/password combination as a user identity for login. When an IP phone is first provisioned for a particular location (e.g., a new office assignment), the user identity is entered directly by the user, in order for the phone to be provisioned to the network. However, an IP telephone does not include a computer keyboard, but rather a twelve-key numeric keypad, for example. It can be a cumbersome and error-prone process for a user to enter an equivalent text code corresponding to a username and password using the telephone keypad.
Other approaches to provisioning are known. For example, hardware-specific information can be used, such as using the media access control (MAC) address of the IP telephone device, which is a physical characteristic of the phone. The MAC address of the device is assigned to a specific telephone line in the network. However, this is not easy to provision and typically requires an administrator or other telephony support to correlate the MAC address with a user's telephone extension. This increases the cost of user provisioning, especially in enterprises where users are frequently moved from one physical location to another. Additionally, in this approach, the IP phone device itself does not contain the user identity, so a separate database is required to link the device identity to the user identity, which further increases the cost of the deployment.